The Erl-King-1

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    The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was suffit to itself; perfect transp<bdi>.９９ｌｉb.</bdi>arency must be imperable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light ing down from sulphur-yellow iices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nie-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, whehered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast a cups underfoot in the russet slime of dead bra where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lanating cold of the approag of wihat grips hold of your belly and squeezed it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not mu the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the immi cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a si hush.

    The woods enclose. You step between the fir trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood any more, this wood has reverted to its inal privacy. Once you are i, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the track years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the subtle labyrinth and nobody es. The trees stir with a noise like taffeta skirts of women who have lost themselves in woods and hunt round hopelessly for the way out. Tumbling crows play tig in the branches of the elms they clotted with their s, now and then raucously g. A little stream with soft margins of marsh runs through the wood but it has grown sullen with the time of the year; the silent, blackish wat<samp>?9９lｉｂ?</samp>er this, now, to ice. All will fall still, all lapse.

    A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood trannys house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the wood is exactly as it seems.

    The woods enclose and then enclose again, like a system of ese boxes opening oo ahe intimate perspectives of the wood ged endlessly around the interloper, the imaginary traveller walking towards an ied distahat perpetually receded before me. It is easy to lose yourself in these woods.

    The two notes of the song of a bird rose oill air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into a sound. There was a little tangled mist ihickets, mimig the tufts of old mans beard that flossed the lower branches of the trees and bushes; heavy bunches of red berries as ripe and delicious as goblin or ented fruit hung on the hawthorns but the old grass withers, retreats. One by ohe ferns have curled up their hundred eyes and curled bato the earth. The trees threaded a cats cradle of half-stripped branches over me so that I felt I was in a house of s and though the cold wind that always heralds your presence, had I but known it then, blew gentle around me, I thought that nobody was in the wood but me.

    Erl-King will do you grievous harm.

    Piergly, now, there came again the call of the bird, as desolate as if it came from the throat of the last bird left alive. That call, with all the melancholy of the failing year in it, went directly to my heart.

    I walked through the wood until its perspectives verged upon a darkening clearing; as soon as I saw them, I k ohat all its octs had been waiting for me from the moment I first stepped into the wood, with the endless patience of wild things, who have all the time in the world.

    It was a garden where all the flowers were birds as; ash-soft doves, diminutive wrens, freckled thrushes, robins iawny bibs, huge, helmeted crows that shone like pateher, a blackbird with a yellow bill, voles, shrews, fieldfares, little brown bunnies with their ears laid together along their backs like spoons, croug at his feet. A lean, tall, reddish hare, up on its great hind legs, witch. The rusty fox, its muzzle sharpeo a point, laid its head upon his knee. Orunk of a scarlet rowan a squirrel g, to watch him; a cock pheasant delicately stretched his shimmering neck from a brake of thorn to peer at him. There was a goat of uny whiteness, gleaming like a goat of snow, who turned her mild eyes towards me and bleated softly, so that he knew I had arrived.

    He smiles. He lays down his pipe, his elder bird-call. He lays upon me his irrevocable hand.

    His eyes are quite green, as if from too much looking at the wood.

    There are some eyes  eat you.

    The Erl-King lives by himself all alone in the heart of the wood in a house which has only the one room. His house is made of sticks and stones and has groelt of yellow li. Grass and weeds grow in the mossy roof. He chops fallen branches for his fire and draws his water from the stream in a tin pail.

    What does he eat? Why, the bounty of the woodland! Stewed les; savoury messes of chickweed sprinkled with nutmeg; he cooks the foliage of shepherds purse as if it were cabbage. He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotted fungi are fit to eat; he uands their eldritch ways, how they spring up ht in lightless places and thrive ohings. Even the homely wood blewits, that you cook like tripe, with milk and onions, and the egg-yolk yellow terelle with its fan-vaulting and faint st of apricots, all spring up ht like bubbles of earth, sustained by nature, existing in a void. And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he came alive from the desire of the woods.

    He goes out in the m to gather his unnatural treasures, he hahem as delicately as he does pigeons eggs, he lays them in one of the baskets he weaves from osiers. He makes salads of dandelion that he calls rude names, &quot;bum-pipes&quot; or &quot;piss-the-beds,&quot; and flavours them with a few leaves of wild strawberry but he will not touch the brambles, he says the Devil spits o Michaelmas.

    His nanny goat, the colour of whey, gives him her abundant milk and he  make soft cheese that has a unique, rank, amniotic taste. Sometimes he traps a rabbit in a snare of string and makes a soup or stew, seasoned with wild garlic. He knows all about the wood and the creatures in it. He told me about the grass snakes, how the old ones open their mouths wide when they smell danger and the thin little ones disappear down the old ohroats until the fright is over and out they e again, to run around as usual. He told me how the wise toad who squats among the kingcups by the stream in summer has a very precious jewel in his head. He said the owl was a bakers daughter; then he smiled at me. He showed me how to thread mats from reeds and weave osier twigs into baskets and into the little cages in which he keeps his singing birds.

    His kit shakes and shivers with birdsong from cage upon cage of singing birds, larks and lis, which he piles up one on anainst the wall, a wall of trapped birds. How cruel it is, to keep wild birds in cages! But he laughs at me when I say that; laughs, and shows his white, poieeth with the spittle gleaming on them.

    He is an excellent housewife. His rustie is spid spas his well-scoured sau and skillet ly on the hearth side by side, like a pair of polished shoes. Over the hearth hang bunches  mushrooms, the thin, curling kind they call jews-ears, which have grown on the elder trees since Judas hanged himself ohis is the kind of lore he tells me, tempting my half-belief. He hangs up herbs in buo dry, too -- thyme, marjoram, sage, verva<q>..</q>in, southern wood, yarrow. The room is musical and aromatid there is always a wood fire crag in the grate, a sweet, acrid smoke, a bright, glang flame. But I  you ot get a tu of the old fiddle hanging on the wall beside the birds because all its strings are broken.

    Now, when I go for walks, sometimes in the ms when the frost has put its shiny thumbprint on the undergrowth or sometimes, though less frequently, yet more entigly, in the evening when the cold darkness settles down, I always go to the Erl-King and he lays me down on his bed of rustling straw where I lie at the mercy of his huge hands. He is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off e all my clothes.

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